January 2008 — News
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Web 2.0 in Education: Trends for 2008
While the technologies collectively known as Web 2.0 have penetrated the consumer sector rapidly over the last four years or so, the process has been much slower and more measured in education. There were some breakthroughs in 2007, with upward trends in the adoption--or at least availability--of Web 2.0 technologies in the areas of teacher professional development and supplemental instructional technologies, such as podcasting, streaming media, and blogging.
For 2008, the watchwords are convenience, collaboration, and convergence, as more and more fundamental applications find a home on the Web--away from the desktop--spawning the next generation of mobile devices and potential new approaches to the use of more traditional computing tools.
However, the path ahead for Web 2.0 in education (and even business) isn't all sunshine and roses. Concerns over security flaws in Web 2.0 technologies may overshadow convenience and collaborative capabilities, further slowing institutional adoption.
Convenience, Collaboration, Convergence
Convergence, of course, is nothing new in technology, but Web 2.0 has put a new spin on it. As consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications continue to grow in popularity--from social networking to digital media sharing to the never-ending array of new mashups--devices also emerge to bring them all together and combine them with more traditional technologies, such as telephones and digital media players. These are seen most dramatically in devices like Apple's iPhone and latest-generation iPods, which combine these technologies with full-featured support for Web applications.
Outside of the Apple camp, a whole new generation of tiny and "ultramobile PCs" is emerging, as seen en masse at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. These are devices designed to take advantage of the latest wireless connectivity technologies to allow access to standard Web technologies in a form factor small enough to fit in users' pockets. And thus, assuming adoption of these kinds of devices speeds up at all this year, we'll see tasks commonly relegated to traditional computers moved over to these mobile devices as users turn to Web-based alternatives to desktop applications like word processing and spreadsheets.
However, it's unlikely such devices, along with their cousins the smart phones, will have a tremendous impact in education, at least in the coming year.
Where these technologies all come together in the here and now--albeit with less mobility--is in traditional computing. And there's a funny sort of irony in that Web 2.0 applications may actually help to bring about the dream/nightmare of thin clients, as notebooks and desktops are transformed into little more than dumb terminals accessing remotely hosted applications. In antithesis to the whole concept of thin client technology, however, Web 2.0, rather than consolidating technology in the hands of IT professionals, skirts the IT department completely.
